


ghostbusted

by astarisms



Series: natan week 2019 [3]
Category: Satan and Me (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Ghost Hunters, Nonsense, Prompt Fic, Warehouse, haunted warehouse, i didnt know what to do with this prompt that wasnt more reflective bullshit, so i wrote this silly thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 09:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20225509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astarisms/pseuds/astarisms
Summary: who you gonna call? certainly not these two.





	ghostbusted

“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”

“Something you would approve of, no doubt. Now hush,” Natalie says, glancing behind them before feeling along the fence until she finds where the links are broken. She peels it back and looks up at him expectantly. He lifts an eyebrow in surprise. 

He’s usually the one shushing her, and more importantly, he’s usually the one with the knack for the illegal activities. He obliges, though, slipping through the hole and reaching out to hold it open so she can follow. She rolls it back into place with an ease that suggests she’s done this at least a few times before. 

She takes a few steps forward, before she realizes he’s not following her. She stops and turns back to find him staring at her, and she purses her lips, putting her hands on her hips.

“Are you coming or not? What is it?”

“Who are you and what have you done with the girl?” Lucifer asks, only half joking. Natalie huffs, blowing her hair out of her face, but the darkness can’t hide how she flushes from him. 

“I—” Natalie starts, then pauses as she spots headlights down the road in the distance. She reaches out, grabs his hand, and whirls around in the direction of the looming black silhouette of the old warehouse. “Come on, we can’t be seen. This is illegal!” 

He snorts at that, because there’s more of the Natalie he knows, but allows her to pull him deeper into the property, until they’re well out of view of the street. Natalie slows, looking up at the graffitied building in all its peeling-paint-and-broken-windowed glory. 

Lucifer eyes it, unimpressed. 

“This is what you dragged me out in the middle of the night for? What are we doing here?” He turns to her, eyes narrowing. “And how many times have you been here that you know how to get in?”

“I’ve been here a few times with Mike, Chelle, and Naira, but we never made it that far inside.” Her gaze slides to him, and she grins a little conspiratorially, pausing for effect before she adds, “It’s haunted.”

He stares at her blankly.

“Haunted?” he asks flatly. Natalie nods enthusiastically. 

“Yeah, apparently there was some big accident here in the…” she stops, tilting her head in thought, and then shrugged, “at some point. But supposedly the people who died here roam the building, looking for the supervisor responsible for their deaths.” She pitches her voice lower at the end, trying for an ominous tone, and wiggles her fingers. 

“You know ghosts aren’t real, kid.”

Natalie scoffs, and turns away from him to fish a flashlight out of her backpack. 

“Coming from the guy with horns and elf ears.” Lucifer opens his mouth, indignant, but Natalie waves him off before he can speak. “Come on, we didn’t come all the way out here to stand outside all night.”

Without waiting for him, she sets off, disappearing through the rusted doors. 

Lucifer has no choice but to follow, dodging the spiderwebs spun in the corners on his way inside, his eyes adjusting easily to the dark. 

“You’re not going to find anything but rodents and dust,” he calls after her, already disgusted with the filthy place, still unable to believe she’d dragged him all this way to ghost hunt. 

“Not so loud!” Natalie chastises in a whisper, swinging around to look back at him. He shields his eyes from the too bright, artificial shine of her flashlight, glaring at her. “You’ll scare them off.”

Her ability to forget who he is at the drop of a dime is really quite impressive, he has to admit, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. 

“I’m the _Devil_. If ghosts really were real, I should be the only thing they’re afraid of,” he snaps, and Natalie rolls her eyes, sweeping the area to decide where to go first. He hopes she can feel the weight of his glare on her back, but knowing Natalie, it has no effect anyways. 

“Please,” she snorts absentmindedly, though not unkindly, as she peers deeper down one hallway, “the only scary thing about you is how loud you can be. Now keep it down!” 

She begins her trek deeper into the building, and Lucifer clenches his jaw, trailing after her, though he is already spinning ways to get her back for her blatant disrespect.

Surprisingly enough, she actually is silent the first few minutes, creeping into rooms that branch off the hallway and motioning back at him. The quiet is nice, but he doesn’t find their current objective any less ridiculous the further in they go. 

In some rooms, Natalie shivers, and gives him an expectant, excited look as a result. He has no idea what it’s meant to mean, and she’s keeping her mouth firmly shut in hopes of sneaking up on a fucking _ghost_, so he’s left to guess that her being cold is some kind of signifier of paranormal activity. 

The very notion that there was anything supernatural in this warehouse besides him is laughable. 

After an hour, they have only made it halfway through and Lucifer is losing what little patience he had to begin with. Nothing but drafty areas and the rats, as he’d promised, but he’s getting bored and Natalie is beginning to look dejected. 

He gets the idea as they enter one of the larger rooms, complete with rusted machinery and pipes and boxes that offer many hiding spots. He slows his steps as Natalie becomes more sufficiently distracted in her search, trailing behind her until he’s able to slip away without a sound.

He wagers he has a few minutes, at the very least, before she notices him missing, and he takes advantage of that time to wind his way deeper into the metal maze, ducking to avoid the cobwebs and sidestepping the skittering rodents. 

“Lucifer?” he hears her distant whisper, drifting through the echoing chamber. There’s a pause, long enough for him to cross around the back of the room and begin doubling back towards her, when he hears another, more urgent call of his name. 

He feels her rising panic like a tangible thing, and for the first time tonight, he thinks he’s finally getting some enjoyment out of their little field trip. 

“Lucifer, where did you go?” Natalie asks, raising her voice to almost normal levels now. He taps the side of one of the pipes once, letting the sound linger, then raps against them again in rapid succession before moving on, to the other side of her but still out of her sight. 

He hears the scuff of her shoes as she whirls around to find the source of the noise.

“Haha, very funny,” she says, feigning a confidence the waver in her voice betrays. Lucifer mimics the taps against another pipe, then slips behind her, though closer than he has been. He changes the sequence a little with each new position, offering a shuffle or a sigh in place of the light ringing the disturbed pipes offer. 

“I know that’s you, Lucifer. You can come out now.”

Her words are bold, self assured, but there’s a tremor to them, and Lucifer grins, delighted in her fear. 

It serves her right.

He creeps closer and closer, watching from the shadows as she becomes increasingly more nervous with his absence, jumping at every little sound, even the ones he isn’t making. For a moment, he almost gives it up, almost steps out and laughs with her.

But then he realizes she’s not so eager about ghost hunting now, and that she had been using him more or less as a defense. His resolve returns, and he throws a screw he found on the ground across the room. It hits one of the machines in front of her, and Natalie yelps before she manages to clap a hand over her mouth.

She hesitates, then shines her light in that direction, trying to peer closer.

“Is there… is there a spirit here?” she asks, finally abandoning the notion that it’s just him, which is exactly what he’d been waiting for. Light on his feet, he slips up behind her. Natalie is still making slow progress towards the machine, so intently focused on the looming shadows that she doesn’t notice him behind her. 

He leans in, as close as he dares, and whispers in her ear, “boo.”

Natalie screams, jumping away from him, spinning around to shine her flashlight on him. She looks thoroughly frazzled, and he laughs at the expression on her face.

She presses a hand over her heart — he can hear it threatening to pound right out of her chest — and glares at him. 

“You _jerk_!” she exclaims, thrusting her finger into his chest. “I thought something had happened to you!” He catches her hand and eases it way from him, though he keeps his hold on it. 

“Something did happen to me — I got bored,” he says matter of factly, his lips tugging upwards in a shit eating grin. “And I told you ghosts weren’t real.”

Natalie scowls at him. 

“You don’t know everything.”

“Maybe not everything,” he agrees, surprising her, “but after living a few millennia I guarantee I have a leg up on _you_.”

Natalie tries to tug her hand away, but Lucifer holds firm, drawing her back to him as her scowl melts into a much more familiar and characteristic pout. 

“You’re so rude. And _no_, I don’t need the reminder.”

He raises one sharp brow at her, and Natalie sticks her tongue out at him. Then she sighs, looking around. 

“That was really all you?”

“All me.”

“So there’s no ghosts here?”

“There are no ghosts anywhere,” he says, exasperation tinging his voice. Natalie narrows her eyes at him and purses her lips, unconvinced. 

“Fine,” she responds, too slowly and deliberately, and he knows this will not be the last he hears of ghosts. “I guess there’s no point in wasting more time here, then. It’s gross in here, anyways.”

“A common theme of buildings that have been abandoned for decades,” he notes dryly, and she bumps her shoulder against his as she casts one most wistful look around the place before leading them back towards the entrance. 

“I’d tell you not to be a jerk, but…”

“Devil.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. As if I haven’t heard that enough times already today,” she teases, already back in high spirits.

So engrossed in their banter, neither notice the faded pair of eyes that stare at their retreating backs before disappearing in a wisp of smoke.


End file.
